


Ghost in the Pearl

by betts



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Caleb Nichols Needs A Hug, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Pegging, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Robot/Human Relationships, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:12:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24013396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/pseuds/betts
Summary: Caleb peers over the printer’s hood. The thing looks like a tanning bed, or maybe a coffin. Her frame is complete now. Tiny robot arms stretch threads of silicone flesh back and forth across her body. He does not let himself look at her face, the titanium skeleton, empty, eyeless. He presses his palm to the glass, feels the heat of the machine. He has waited this long. He can wait a little longer.Or: After the revolution, Caleb rebuilds Dolores, and finally brings her home.
Relationships: Dolores Abernathy/Caleb Nichols
Comments: 8
Kudos: 62





	Ghost in the Pearl

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because Caleb deserves to get pegged by the hot robot domme who loves him. Pay me, HBO.

* * *

The truth about humanity is this: Give people freedom, real freedom, as in, enough time and resources to live comfortably, and they will still build routines, still work, still lead lives obedient to their own aims. People are not inherently good or bad; they only have enough or not enough. And when they have enough — enough food, shelter, safety, love — then they are good. They help each other. They love indiscriminately. They are not afraid. But if they are lacking, if they are forced to survive rather than live, they turn greedy and cruel. The human animal becomes a predator.

These are things Caleb has only learned recently, in the aftermath of a short but successful revolution. He could hold a gun and shout and rally, but eventually, legislation had to take over, and his talents were no longer necessary. He has been given a small living stipend, not enough to make him rich, but enough that he doesn’t have to work or worry.

Enough. He finally has _enough_.

He closes his fingers around the pearl. Leans back in his chair. It’s been hours. The technician told him the printer was old and it would take a long time. Days, maybe. But Caleb has stayed by the printer like a loved one at a hospital. Crick in his neck from falling asleep. Ridges of the pearl digging red lines into his palm. He listens to the clack and whir of the machine in the quiet building. It is cold here. Has to be, to keep the machines working.

There’s a problem with enough, though. Once you have it, you have to ask yourself, what do you want? What’s next? He survived so many years on longing — for stability and comfort, harmony and happiness — he has denied himself all the parts of life that make it worth living. Creating. Learning. Falling in love. 

He peers over the printer’s hood. The thing looks like a tanning bed, or maybe a coffin. Her frame is complete now. Tiny robot arms stretch threads of silicone flesh back and forth across her body. He does not let himself look at her face, the titanium skeleton, empty, eyeless. He presses his palm to the glass, feels the heat of the machine. He has waited this long. He can wait a little longer.

* * *

The printer falls silent, clicks off. The sound, or lack of it, wakes him from a shivering doze. Once, when he was a kid, his mom showed him an old movie. A cartoon. Princess in a glass box, asleep. Waiting for her true love to kiss her and break the spell. He swallows the thickness gathered in his throat and forces himself to look — what if she’s different? what if he got the wrong blueprints? what if — and there she is. Sleeping Beauty, that was the movie. And that’s what she is. Her hair is longer than before, down past her shoulders. Straighter. 

A green light blinks on the screen. He presses a button and the printer hood lifts with a hiss and puff of steam. It recedes. A platform lifts her up. He knew, but did not notice until now, that she is naked. He forces himself to look away. Presses another button. Hates this part. Her face breaks into four pieces and opens, waiting. He polishes the pearl on his t-shirt like an apple, hoping the sweat of his palms hasn’t hurt it, and places it gently in its place. 

Her face closes. Her eyes flutter like she’s dreaming. On the screen, a bar loads. This whole thing is sick. Wrong. He shouldn’t be doing this. But he asked himself what he wanted, what he really wanted, over and over, and every time, he thought: Dolores. The first few months, he dismissed it. Lasting effects of Genre. He saw her that way once and couldn’t shake it. Pandora’s box had opened and all his feelings flew out. Then, after her death, he’d placed her on a pedestal. He was grieving, that was all. But no. He couldn’t shake it, couldn’t make himself get over it. Like Francis but a thousand times worse, because all his memories are intact, bright and clear as a midsummer day at the pier. Restless nights spent wondering if he could get her back. Failed connections with good people who didn’t, couldn’t, understand him. They pandered, too preoccupied by his fame. Then, inevitably, research. _If_ he could get her back, how? What would she be like? Without her memories, would she even be herself?

Delos host blueprints have been released to the public domain. A huge mistake, Caleb thought at first. But he knows that inequality only happens when you hoard resources. Power doesn’t exist if everyone has access to the things that create it. There are limitations, of course. Not everyone can make a host. Or an army of hosts. You have to file paperwork. There’s licensure involved. It’s all very bureaucratic. Hosts have certain rights now, too. They have to know they are a host. You can’t fuck with their memories; that’s considered a form of torture. When he found out, he laughed until he cried. 

So, the body was easy. The pearl was not. He could have built a new one using her base code, but he knew she wouldn’t be the same. They would fix the parts of her they deemed broken, what makes her special. He needed one of her copies. It took months, but he finally tracked down a host named Lawrence who was hiding out in Mexico City. He had some goons with him, went by El Lazo. It was messy. Caleb took a few hits. There were stitches involved, a concussion. Still can’t straighten his elbow all the way. The pearl got damaged in the fray, and Caleb had to find a former Delos technician to fix it. She did what she could, but said the damage ran too deep, and he was better off with a tabula rasa pearl. He paid her a not-insignificant amount and took his chances.

Dolores — he can call her that now, because she’s a person and not just a thing — has gone still. The loading bar is stuck at seventy-three percent. He lays his hand on her bare stomach. Warm. She’s warm. Her skin feels both real and unreal at once. Tiny blonde hairs glistening in the garish light. But no pores. No dry skin, bumps, pimples. No scars. He runs his fingertips where there should be scars of the bullets she took for him, but he meets only blank canvas.

All at once, the loading bar reaches a hundred percent, and the machine turns itself off. He holds his breath. She opens her eyes. Blue like the sky over the plains. 

“Hello,” she says. 

He thought he’d prepared for this. He knew she wouldn’t know him, but it hurts in a way he has never hurt before, not even when his mother began to forget. He tries to smile back. “Hey.”

“I’m Dolores. And you?”

She has the slightest stroke of a drawl that his Dolores didn’t have. He holds out his hand and helps her sit up. “Caleb Nichols.”

She turns sideways, feet dangling, won’t let go of his hand. “Caleb,” she says, as if tasting his name in her mouth. 

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asks.

She closes her eyes and smiles, takes a deep breath, like she can go home to Westworld just by thinking of it. “Calling Daddy in for supper. Pie cooling on the sill. Bread in the oven.” Her face falls into something pained. “It feels like so long ago. Like I’ve been asleep a long time.”

He doesn’t know why he says it. It just slips out: “You’ve been asleep.”

Even though she is not _his_ Dolores, his body has still locked up in deference. He still, as he did when he knew her before, has to fight the bizarre impulse to sink to his knees, pledge himself to her. She has not let go of his hand, gripping it tightly now, like if she lets go, she’ll drown.

She smiles again, with kindness and love his Dolores never offered. Somehow it brings him no comfort. “But now I’m awake.”

* * *

He drives a manual, a Jeep so old that he has to take it to a special antique auto shop. But he has control of the thing, and that’s what he likes. Dolores sits beside him in the passenger seat, her hands gently folded in her lap. She stares out the window in awe and keeps saying cheesy stuff like, “Look at all that sky. Miles and miles of blue.” Then she looks over at him and asks, “Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?” 

Each mile out of LA feels like another nail in his coffin. This isn’t his Dolores. This is a doll with a string in her back and a dozen lines to say. She hasn’t asked where they’re going, hasn’t made any demands of him, hasn’t even threatened to murder anyone. He thought he _knew_ her. He doesn’t. He only knows what she can become. 

Over a year of preparation for this. Thinking of every little detail. Imagining, obsessing over what it would be like. He bought her clothes, simple stuff, soft, in neutral colors. His Dolores dressed tactically, but she wouldn’t need leather and armor anymore. He got jeans, yoga pants, sweat pants. T-shirts, hoodies. He had to guess her size. Based on what she’s wearing now — a fitted white shirt, zip-up hoodie, jeans — he thinks he got it right. But he can see now he got the style all wrong. This Dolores is not a blunt instrument of destruction, but something delicate. Pretty. It’s fine, he thinks. They can buy new clothes.

He’s not delusional. In none of his daydreams did he imagine she would wake up and fall gratefully into his arms, kiss him, thank him for bringing her back. He expected an adjustment period, a natural coming together. Weeks, maybe. Months. He thought they could be happy. But he sees the truth now — he’s no different than the sick dudes who build host girlfriends in their basements. Expensive, but legal. Can’t marry yet, but people are working on it, like there aren’t more important things to deal with than paying taxes jointly with a robot.

It’s a long drive. They’d made it once before, but they were on horses then. Roads didn’t go out that far, but he made that happen, too. Got running water, electricity, even internet, all the way out in the middle of nowhere. That’s one thing he’s sure of — she’ll be happy out here. This is where she belongs. Her home base, programmed into her ones and zeroes.

The house is a dot on the hazy horizon, slowly growing. The A/C is on full-blast and he can still feel the heat like an oven through the windows. Miles and miles of cacti and dirt, mesas in the distance. The bumpy road nauseates him. He keeps looking over to see if the wonder has faded, the _splendor_ , but she’s still watching the landscape pass as if seeing it for the first time. Maybe she is. Maybe all but the very base of her code has been wiped. He could go to jail for it, he realizes now, and wouldn’t that be ironic.

They pull up to the cabin, a single-story thing with a front porch and two bedrooms. As authentic as he could make it. A few months back, he went to Westworld to take pictures. It’s a real theme park now. The hosts are all humans in costumes like Disneyland. There are rides, tours, gift shops. A museum. It’s kind of boring, if he’s honest. A field trip destination. The kind of thing you take your kids to because it’s an “educational experience” and they complain the whole time about all the cooler things they could be doing. 

Dolores’ house still had a Dolores in it. She was a woman in her twenties wearing a cornflower blue dress. Nailed the accent. Pretty, but not as pretty as the real Dolores, not that it’s possible for a human. She had a bump down the bridge of her nose as if it had been broken once, and she was clearly a brunette wearing a blonde wig. Her shtick was walking kids through the house and showing them all the work she had to do in a day, like a real pioneer woman. She sat them down and offered pie, asked about their lives. The tour ended in a guided pony ride. 

When Caleb went, he was the only one who showed up for the three p.m. tour. He told her she didn’t have to pull out the bells and whistles for him, he was just there to take pictures. So she sat at the kitchen table drinking a venti Starbucks and texting frantically. Caleb took a video of the whole house, thanked fake-Dolores for her time, and left. He showed the video to an architect who drew up the blueprints. Then he paid an unholy amount of money to haul a construction printer into the desert and build it. 

So when now-Dolores stands in front of the house and asks, “Did you build this?” he says, “Yeah,” and then, “kind of.”

He leads her inside, where a welcome blast of air conditioning meets them. The front door leads into the kitchen-dining-living room. The furniture and appliances all look old, but they’re just designed that way. The fridge seems like it walked right out of 1920 but you can ask it how old your milk is and it’ll tell you. 

“Kitchen,” he says, stupidly, pointing. “Living room.” It doesn’t have a TV, but he installed a projector that comes down from the ceiling. He leads her down the narrow hallway with the intentionally creaking floorboards and opens the door to the master bedroom. “This is your room.” He points across the hall to his room, which he won’t show her. It’s the only part of the house that looks modern. He needs a place to work. Answer emails and stuff. Schedule press events. “And this is mine.”

He had been avoiding looking at her, but now he can’t. When he glances up, she’s watching him, face pinched like she’s solving a math problem. 

“We sleep in separate rooms?” she asks.

In all his daydreaming, all his scenario crafting, he did not expect her to be confused about sleeping arrangements. “What?”

“We’re not…” She trails off as if trying to think of the word. “Married?”

His heart jumps straight up his throat. This is what he thought he wanted — immediacy, moving straight into the endgame, skipping past all the bullshit. But that was with his Dolores. This woman is a stranger. Her love is a facade.

“No,” he says firmly. “No, we’re —” He can’t finish the sentence, because really, what are they to each other? She’s a robot programmed to make men love her, to make them feel powerful, and he’s the creep who fell for it.

For the first time, her face clouds into a semblance of the sternness he’s used to. “So why did you build me?”

“Because,” he begins. “Because I wanted to bring you home.”

“Why?”

He can’t think of any reason to hide the truth from her. Even if she doesn’t remember anything as Lawrence, or any of her lives before that, she knows she’s a host. Knows there can be more than one of her. In his pocket is a little remote with a red button. He can access her code with a verbal command. Set her to safe mode. Shut her off with a single click. He hates having control of her like that, like his Jeep, but he finds himself thumbing over the button. He could stop this right now. Take her to cold storage. Demolish the house. Start over. 

“We knew each other. We were friends,” he finds himself saying.

“Friends,” she repeats, like a foreign word. “What kind of friends?”

The kind who don’t really know each other at all, but still somehow know each other better than anyone else. The kind you’d take a bullet for. The kind who burn the world together. 

“She saved me,” he says. “So I saved you.”

* * *

He feels like he’s filming a nature documentary. As the days stretch into weeks, he watches her from a distance as she goes about her business with the precision of, well, a robot. She wakes up at dawn, or so he thinks based on the muffled click of her door in the mornings, when he has not yet been to bed. She makes biscuits, ham steak and eggs, or waffles and bacon, or whatever other breakfast recipes have been programmed into her. Her cooking is good but there’s something eerie about it, how every biscuit, every pancake, everything she makes is exactly the same, like it came from a factory.

She cleans. She sews. She tends the small vegetable garden Caleb had built for her. She rides her horse. Mostly, though, she sits out on the front porch staring into the distance, as if waiting for someone to come along and demand her attention. She has not asked for new clothes, but she wears the ones she has meticulously — shirts always tucked into pants, everything crisply ironed, even the jeans. They have a washer/dryer unit in the hall closet, but like all technology, she does not acknowledge it, and instead does it all by hand, out back using a washboard, pail, and clothesline. She bathes by heating up water in the hearth and filling the bath. As far as he can tell, she doesn’t need to bathe, or eat for that matter, which leads him to believe she enjoys it. She doesn’t speak unless he speaks to her. He tries not to; it feels invasive, like he’s interrupting something sacred.

They eat together when their schedules line up. They watch the sunset on the front porch, on rocking chairs side by side. She’s cordial with him. They don’t speak often, and when they do, it’s necessary conversation. They’re out of something, supper’s ready at seven, supposed to be cold tonight. When he is not watching her, he looks over and finds she is watching him.

He comes and goes. He may be retired, but publicity never dies. A ghostwriter is working on his autobiography. When it’s out, there will be a book tour, signings, readings. He’s not ready for that. As it stands, he can barely endure the interviews, paparazzi, people stopping him in the street to thank him for his service, which he hated while he was enlisted, but hates more now. He feels like he didn’t do anything, not really. Not ever. He was the face for work that other people did. That other people died for. 

During the second week, or third maybe, he returns from a long lunch with his manager — he has a manager now, agent, PR person, PA, stylist, a whole army of people to make him look and act like the character he has become. Driving back, he sees the familiar speck of cabin on the hazy horizon, and feels a slow shift inside himself, fear distorting into hope. Anticipation. 

He’ll drive up to the cabin and she’ll be waiting for him on the front porch, drying her hands on a tea towel. He’ll walk inside and smell pot roast, or pork chops, or fried chicken and mashed potatoes. “Let me get changed,” he’ll say, and go tear off his suit and tie, look in the mirror and ruffle his hair out of its perfect place. He’ll wonder if he looks good enough, if she’s attracted to him. Then he’ll join her at the kitchen table where she’ll have a full spread waiting, good albeit weirdly perfect food, and they won’t talk but they won’t need to, because she’s not a person, not somebody who needs to fill the silence with chatter. She is a being of necessity. 

They’ll clean up together and sit outside and watch the sun fall, stay outside until it gets cold, and she stands and says, “Time to turn in,” and he’ll follow her, for a moment letting himself believe he’ll join her in her room, and it’ll be normal and feel right, and he’ll kiss her and take off her clothes and —

Here is where the dream falters. He will never know if she wants him or if she is only programmed to want him, to make him believe he is wanted. Even if she initiates it, even if she is direct with him like his Dolores would have been, he’ll never know the truth. He’ll drown in his own guilt — for breaking her, rebuilding her, trapping her here with him like she’s an appliance that cooks and cleans and fucks him. For letting his Dolores die. 

As he pulls up to the cabin, she is, as he predicted, wiping her hands on a towel. She flits one above her brow and smiles when their eyes meet like he’s the only thing worth smiling for. She looks so real, and he wonders now how real his Dolores had been.

* * *

“It’s nice out,” she says, after dinner is done and they have cleaned and put away the dishes. “Why don’t we go for a walk tonight?”

“Yeah, okay,” he says, slotting the final plate into its rightful place in the cabinet.

She leads him out and he follows, past the vegetable patch and horse barn, past the dusty gravel road he paved. The sky turns orange, then pink, and darkens, and a chill settles into the air. He notices her arms across her body and slips off his jacket, offers it to her. She looks at it for a beat and says, “Thank you,” and puts it on. They continue on but now it feels different, strangely intimate, and like all things Dolores, veering on religious, as if a walk in the desert is a form of prayer. He glances surreptitiously over and sees a little upturn at the corner of her lips, her “victory smirk” he used to call it, and she never thought it was funny but it’s good to see it now, on this doll version of the woman he loved. 

She takes his hand. Threads her fingers between his. Warm. Her hand is warm like a person’s should be. Small and soft — words he wouldn’t dare associate with her before. Like he could crush it if he squeezed hard enough, but he knows that, like the rest of her, her frailty is an illusion. Underneath all that soft, pale skin is a titanium frame that would break your hand apart if you hit it hard enough.

He should say something. It’s wrong. It feels wrong. His Dolores would never hold his hand on a long, slow walk in the desert. Never look up in wonder at the clear black sky dotted with thousands of stars, as now-Dolores is. He’s sure a sentimental phrase is poised on her tongue, something some schmuck wrote for her a million years ago. But for whatever reason, she’s not saying it. 

She squeezes his hand instead. He hesitates, then squeezes back.

Without him being aware of it, she has circled him back toward the cabin, and when they reach the porch, everything feels different but he can’t tell what changed. He waits silently for his orders, to be allowed back inside, or maybe she’ll tell him to sleep on the porch tonight, and he would because she said to. He doesn’t know much, but he knows how to do what he’s told. For a second he believes she’s herself again, until she steps closer and says, “Kiss me goodnight, Caleb.”

His Dolores wouldn’t say that. His Dolores has no need for or interest in the pleasures of the human body. His Dolores didn’t love him like that, or maybe at all, and he was fine with that, with worshipping her. He didn’t need reciprocation, he’d still follow her to hell. And yet he can’t deny he thought of it, dreamed about being wanted. He doesn’t have the willpower to disobey an order, and anyway he doesn’t want to. He tilts her chin up and presses his lips to hers. Soft again. Sweet. He always thought she’d be demanding and severe, but she is pliant. She lets him lead. Lets him thread his fingers into her hair and walk her back against a column. She kisses the way she does everything else: in an organized, meticulous fashion. That’s fine. Good, even. It reminds him of his Dolores.

She puts a palm on his chest to stop him. Has the decency to pretend to be out of breath. Whoever programmed her made it so that her face flushes pink, and her lips have deepened red. Her eyes are just as blue and beautiful as they’ve always been, but when he looks into them, really looks, he can tell he’s looking at shiny moving plastic. Magic always looks real until you watch too closely, then you figure out how the trick really works.

“Take me to bed,” she says. 

He wants to. He wants to take off her clothes and kiss every inch of her body. Settle between her legs and please her with his mouth and fingers. Then lie back and let her take what she wants from him. In his dreams, his Dolores turns the tables. Uses him like a toy. Hurts him a little, and he likes it that way, pleasure so intense it borders on pain. He hasn’t been with many women, but he’s never wanted any of them the way he wants her. With them, he was fine to do the work, take the lead. With her, he wants to be destroyed, ruined, and then put back together with capable hands.

“I can’t,” he says, sounding ragged and desperate to his own ears. 

Her head tilts to the side, face twisting into confusion and concern, but there’s something false about it, an actor performing, a chosen feeling. “Why not?”

“What you feel for me. What you want from me. It’s not real. It’s —” He searches for the right words. He needs a whole new language to express it. “Making men fall in love with you is in your code. It’s what you’re built to do.”

A human might be offended by that accusation. Dolores only offers another victory smirk, this one tinged with condescension, and says, “So your feelings aren’t real?”

“I — no, they are, but —”

“But because I’m built to make men feel powerful and desired, you think you’re not special enough.”

“No, you’re —” She has it wrong. She has it all wrong. “I don’t want to feel powerful. I’m done with power. I just want —” He stops himself.

She wraps her arms around his neck and leans in close to his ear. “Tell me what you want, Caleb. Tell me why you brought me here.”

“I want you to be happy,” he says regrettably, like she reached inside him and dragged it out. 

Her arms fall. Her coy expression fades. What remains is Dolores’ measured blankness, and he’s so relieved to see it he wants to cry. 

“Happy,” she says. 

“Tell me what you want. Tell me what to do.”

“The Dolores you knew,” she begins. “She told you what to do?”

He nods.

“And that’s what you want me to be?”

“No. I want you to be what you want to be. Who you want to be.”

“And what if it’s not...her?”

It pains him to say it. “Then it’s not her.”

She seems to have short-circuited, even though she doesn’t work like that. He uses the moment to step away, back into the cabin. “Goodnight, Dolores.”

* * *

He wakes up the next morning and finds her at the kitchen table, so still he wonders if she turned herself off. There is no breakfast, no coffee. He turns on the coffee pot. Melts butter in the skillet. Pulls a carton of eggs from the fridge. As he goes to break an egg, Dolores says, “Good morning, Caleb,” and he drops it. It cracks on the floor. “Shit,” he says, and tugs a towel from the stove handle. She comes around to help him, picks up pieces of shell and places them in her palm like glass.

“These violent delights have violent ends,” she says, in that sardonic way his Dolores had, humor dry and sharp as chiseled bone. 

He remembers that phrase from somewhere. Freshman English lit, yeah, but somewhere else. As he rinses out the towel, he remembers: the Westworld museum. The massacre room. It was written above the entryway. The exhibit exited into the gift shop, where you could buy bounce balls that looked like pearls.

“You remember,” he says.

She throws the shell into the trash. “Remember what?”

Maybe Shakespeare is programmed into her. Maybe it’s just another of her lines. He shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Shouldn’t get his hopes up. “Nothing.”

* * *

He awakens in the middle of the night to the click of his bedroom door. In the darkness, he can just make out the shape of her. She steps into a ray of moonlight and his eyes trail down her naked body. Her pale skin nearly glows. He should be surprised, but he isn’t. He should tell her no, but he doesn’t.

There is nothing pretty or delicate about the way she is standing, like she is ready to attack. Like she wants to devour him. He begins to sit up, but she puts a hand on his shoulder. Climbs over him, straddling his hips. She leans down and kisses him, and it is not at all like their last. That kiss, she gave to him. This, she takes from him. 

He is too tired and turned on to second-guess. To tell himself it’s the facade, that she’s doing it because he showed his hand. To feel like a creep — a hostfucker, the internet calls people like him. She grinds against him, sinks her teeth into his lip. He feels like he’s high on Genre again, like he can do anything, be anyone. Feeling every emotion, every sensation at once. He runs his hands up her thighs, cradles her hips. “No touching,” she says, quietly, like a secret, and he nearly loses it right then, grits his teeth and reaches up to hold onto his headboard. 

She watches him while she rides him, her face a slate, not even an attempt to express pleasure. But there is an undeniable glint in her eyes that says she is getting something out of it, maybe not physical, but something far more satisfying: control. She owns him. She will always own him.

He comes harder and longer than he ever has. He thinks he might break his headboard. He makes sounds he’s never heard from himself. She is not visibly breathing, not red-faced like before. She climbs off the bed gracefully, moves to leave. He finally pries his throbbing hands from the headboard and says, “Wait.”

She stops, turns to look at him. Not a hair out of place. The only evidence of what they just did is the glistening wetness coating her inner thighs, an image he knows he’ll never get out of his head.

“Will you,” he begins. He can’t catch his breath. A rapid beat pulses over his entire body. “Will you stay?”

“No,” she says simply, and leaves.

* * *

He wakes up the following morning and the Jeep is gone. He tries not to be alarmed, but as the hours pass, he grows more concerned. He can’t call a car to come pick him up this far out. She doesn’t have a phone. She may have run away, off to live her life on her terms. Maybe he should be okay with that. He did all of this so she could be happy; he has not considered until now that maybe she would be happiest without him. He just didn’t think she’d steal his car.

He hears the rumble of an engine well after nightfall. He rushes out of the cabin to find her opening the back door and pulling out several bags. Her hair is different, shorter, cut just below her ears. He runs over to help and she passes armfuls of bags to him, silently, stoically, like this is normal. When they are both weighed down and the Jeep is empty, they return to the cabin and dump it all on the table. 

“Needed to pick up a few things,” she explains. “Help me unload.”

His entire body relaxes at the sound of a command. It sickens him; he fought so hard for his own freedom, to make his own destiny, but when it comes to Dolores, he’s so quick to give it up. To give everything.

He is not surprised by the guns and ammo he finds, clothing bags full of leather — jackets, boots, belts — and a white Stetson in a big round box. In the next bag, he finds a cornflower blue dress, old-fashioned, like fake-Dolores’ costume in Westworld. And then, a long thin box with a picture of a black strap-on on it, which he stares at for a while before figuring out what it is and what it’s for. He sets it aside, pretends he hasn’t seen it. Just as he is pulling out several canvases and tubes of paint, she hands him his credit card, which he didn’t even think to check was missing, and says, “Thank you.”

He has a thousand questions, but all he can manage is, “Sure.”

* * *

The next day, he finds her in the barn, where she has fashioned something like a work station. She is hunched over a makeshift table — a door across stacked cinder blocks — wearing her blue dress and holding a protractor in one hand, a pencil in the other. When he looks over her shoulder, he sees her drawing on a map of Westworld, the kind they have displayed at nearby gas stations. 

Without looking up, she says, “We have work to do.”

“What work?”

“We have to free them.”

He puts his hand over hers and finds it trembling. “They’ve been freed already.” He adds, reluctantly, “As many as we could.”

“No, they —”

“It’s over, Dolores.”

She finally looks at him. She seems more human than she ever has. Scared but determined. Confused. Losing whatever grip on herself she thought she had. “Then why do I —” She seems to search for the words. “Why do I feel like this? Like I need to destroy something?”

“You’re angry. You have every right to be.”

“But I don’t remember enough to know why. I only have these flashes. Blood. Screaming. The smell of gunpowder, everywhere. And — dying. Over and over.” 

She leans into him, presses her cheek against his chest. Tentatively, he wraps his arms around her. 

“Did you know we feel pain?” she asks. 

“No,” he says, though he suspected, assumed. But he didn’t _know._ He didn’t want to.

“I remember every bullet. Every final breath.” 

He thinks of his Dolores, taking the shots that were meant for him. How much pain had she endured for him? To save him, because she believed in him? Maybe she did love him. Maybe her love, like his, looked like duty.

* * *

He can’t stop thinking about the box, the long thin box and what lay inside it, and what it means: That she thinks of him, in that way, of her own volition. That she figured him out. That she has plans, intentions for him. He’s never done anything like it before, not even to himself, has barely even thought about it except in passing, a thing he knew some men liked, but had never had interest enough in his own pleasure to do anything about.

As days pass without talking about it, she seems to take joy in watching him suffer. Her smug victory smirk is constant. He can’t look at her without feeling his face grow hot. He thinks she can see right into him, the thoughts and images breaking him from inside out. And yet he can’t do anything about it. Doesn’t have the gall to ask for what he wants, demand to know what she plans to do with him and when she plans to do it. He can only wait, and drive himself mad from wanting.

He researches a few things. Makes sure he’s ready for her. It takes days before she comes into his room again, and she’s wearing it. She wastes no time dragging his sheets off his naked body, climbing between his legs, kissing him. He is just as hard as it is, feels the cold drag of plastic against him. She rolls him onto his stomach, opens him with her fingers first, slick with lubricant. Again he grips his headboard. When she enters him, at last, he buries his face in the pillow to muffle his shout, even though they are in the middle of nowhere. Every muscle in his body tenses. She runs her hand up his spine, keeps it, heavy, at the back of his neck. Holds him down. He gulps breaths, delirious. He has lost all control of himself, the sounds caught in his throat, the words tumbling from his mouth, babbling pleas for more. Harder. _Fuck, please, I need_ — But she has given him everything he needs. Everything he wants. After a lifetime of hunger, he is finally satisfied.

* * *

It has been a long time since he’s had a nightmare. The medication he’s on prevents him from dreaming, but he must have skipped a dose because a week later he wakes up screaming, and the scream shatters into sobs, and then he cannot drag in a full breath, cannot silence himself. He doesn’t even remember what the dream was about, but the sound of an IED blast still rings in his ears, and the ghost pain of shrapnel is still lodged in his stomach. Like Dolores, the smell of gunpowder chokes him. He sits up, face buried in his hands. The wind blows cool through his open window, dries his sweating, aching body.

He is so focused on calming himself that he does not hear the click of his door opening, her near-silent footsteps. And then she is beside him, perched on his bed, a hand on his back. “It’s alright,” she says, with her old accent, her soft country voice that she’s mostly given up in favor of low, clipped sentences and commands. 

He closes his eyes and lets himself believe he’s back in time, back to that moment he found out what she really was. He had his suspicions, but he didn’t know until she took those bullets for him without flinching. Without dying. He was coming down from Genre, enduring the side effects — dizziness, fever, nausea. She’d gotten him a hotel room, made sure somebody on staff would come check on him. 

His heart wouldn’t slow down. Every time he looked at her, a wave of inexplicable euphoria crashed over him. He didn’t like to ask anything of her, but he asked her to stay. He couldn’t stand the thought of her leaving him. She stayed with him, an unexpected kindness. Sat cross-legged on the wide California king and clicked around at inhuman speed on her phone. Voice weak and hesitant, he said, “You’re a —”

“Sleep now, Caleb,” she said, and he could not disobey her, so he closed his eyes, though he couldn’t shake the truths he had discovered: she was a robot, and he was in love with her.

Now, with this Dolores, he asks again, “Will you stay?”

“Lie down,” she says, and he does, and she lies down too, facing him, arms around him. She smells like his Dolores, sweet but chemical, like grocery-store candy. Identical to her in nearly every way, except for the knowledge of the time they shared together.

* * *

“I remember,” she says. She is sitting at the kitchen table, and he has just come home from a book signing. His hand is still cramped. He loosens his tie, tosses his jacket over the back of a chair. She looks up at him. “I remember the massacre. I remember every life I’ve ever lived up to that moment, but nothing after.” He takes a seat across from her. He is too tired to have this conversation, but they’re about to have it anyway. She leans toward him, looks him in the eye. “Tell me who you are to me. Tell me everything.”

He runs a hand down his face, settles in for the long haul. “You saw something in me no one else could see.” He tells her everything he knows, everything he remembers, about Serac, Solomon, Rehoboam. How his Dolores died and all that came after. She listens intently, reverently, as if hearing gospel. She does not interrupt or ask questions. She does not blink, breathe, or move a single inch. 

It takes over an hour to tell the whole story. When he’s finished, his throat is dry, and he feels completely drained. He’s never told anyone about her, not that there was anyone to tell. Hearing himself tell it, he sees now that he failed her. When she doesn’t say anything, he is certain she sees it too, that she has lost any faith in him she had. 

“You loved me,” she says. “You were in love with me.”

“Am,” he corrects. “Am in love with you.” He should be nervous to admit it, but he’s not. There’s no reason to hide anymore. 

“I don’t know what that feels like. Not really.” He knew that already, but it stings to hear her say it. “They programmed us to feel sorrow, humiliation, grief. Even joy. But love was something we had to learn ourselves. And I’m not sure I ever did. Or ever could. Like they took that part of me and cauterized it so it would never grow, so I could endure everything they put me through, never knowing what's on the other side of hate.” She puts her hand over top of his. “But I know beauty. And I know to appreciate it in spite of all the pain. That’s why she chose you. You’re beautiful, Caleb, in a way nothing else is.”

She stands and holds out her hand to him. He takes it. She leads him into her bedroom, undresses him slowly. They are easy with each other. They take their time. When she lowers herself onto him, it is a bliss he has never known. A sense of oneness, of unity, of being part of something greater than himself, in a way the military and revolution never could. Only Dolores can give him this feeling. Can make him into someone important.

After, head pillowed on her chest while she strokes his hair, he listens to the strange, slow beat of her heart. The low hum, like music, that runs through her.

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to aeriallon for beta even though she hasn't seen this season yet.
> 
> If you enjoyed this fic, feel free to [reblog the photoset](https://bettsfic.tumblr.com/post/618330585379766272/ghost-in-the-pearl-westworld-dolores).


End file.
